Spotted in last weekend's newspaper book review: an advert for this book, called Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel-Words, and Management-Speak are Strangling Public Language.
I think I need this book. Actually, I'll probably buy it for my father-in-law, who is the only other person I know who gets more annoyed by hackneyed corporate lingo than I do. Then I can bum it off him later...heh heh.
It seems that business isn't the only sector that gets a dressing-down in this book. Academics, too, are slated for their over-reliance on fashionable postmodern gobbledygook (personally, I've always found po-mo speak to be like an audible badge of a certain tribe in academia - if you can talk the talk, you're in). Needless to say, given the ties my own office has to a particular government agency, some of the words and phrases that regularly come out of my colleagues' mouths make me cringe: 'capture', 'outcome-based', 'closure', 'stakeholders'... Aaargh.
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